Lowell Deeds

For some reason on Sunday morning I went to www.masslandrecords.com to look up some property records. The site was down. I reported it to a contact at the Secretary of State’s office who informed the IT folks. I’m not sure when they were able to get to it, but the site came back online yesterday (Monday - the Martin Luther King Day holiday) at about noon. While the site was down, I received a dozen or so emails from what appeared to be first-time users complaining about our “lousy website.” I think our regular users were familiar enough with the workings of our site to know it was a temporary problem, but it was clear that first impressions mean a lot. I replied to each of the emails explaining the situation and sent additional replies yesterday when the site came back online. As for the cause of the outage, it appears to have been a software or programming issue that involved the firewall that protects the database from intruders. While it’s unfortunate we had any outage at all, this type of issue is less worrisome than a major equipment or software failure, neither of which has occurred for several years.